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Belong on superuser but you can find utilities to zero write all the hard drives
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Jesus RamosSep 20 '11 at 5:24

1

Three votes to close as off-topic. Why? Isn't this part of a sysadmin's job? I've personally have to sanitise many hard drives as part of my duties.
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John GardeniersSep 20 '11 at 9:04

1

This seems like an appropriate question here (I run into this question several times a year in my job), and I don't see any good reasons why it was closed. Voting to reopen.
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Stefan LasiewskiSep 27 '11 at 0:02

5 Answers
5

I endorse all the other recommendations for DBAN, but if you really can't do this, I've had a lot of success with shutting down as many services as I can (esp. the windowing system), then doing

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1000k

from a root shell prompt, sitting back, and waiting. This basically writes pseudorandom bytes, a megabyte at a time, all over /dev/sda (you may need to use /dev/hda or other device as appropriate to your setup).

Because the kernel and the tool are in-core, the system will stay up for a surprising amount of time while this is running, and it leaves an utterly unbootable and mostly-completely-scrambled system behind it.

nice tool! did not know about this. we wont be able to use this as getting them to burn this, boot it for us, etc, will be a headache. but will definatly keep this in mind for the future! thanx.
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anonymous-oneSep 20 '11 at 5:33

+1 Elegant! I didn't know one could do that.
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MadHatterSep 20 '11 at 6:53

Perhaps you could even set DBAN as the default boot image. I'm not sure if it can be made to wipe a drive or set of drives without human intervention, but if it can (through boot command line parameters) then that may be a workable approach.
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Michael KjörlingSep 20 '11 at 7:54

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@Michael Kjörling: You can with kernel=dban.bzi nuke="dwipe --autonuke" but you'll have no confirmation of successful wipe and you'll have only one try &mdash; you wouldn't be able to boot back to system even if it was not properly wiped.
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TometzkySep 20 '11 at 9:03